Teaching Documents by Michaela Spencer
One understanding of cosmopolitics can be traced back to Kant and associated with the extension o... more One understanding of cosmopolitics can be traced back to Kant and associated with the extension of a particular – western, European, modern – way of being to the entire world. However, in an era of ecological crises, refugee movements, and increasing calls for indigenous sovereignty, such understandings of cosmopolitics seem neither possible nor desirable. If we want to engage meaningfully with such issues, we need to learn to do politics between different worlds. How is this possible? The aim of this advanced masters course is to address this question with the help of such renowned anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers as The course is divided into two parts. In the first part, we discuss a set of readings which exhibit a variety ways scholars have figured differences of the West and its 'others' as studies of cosmopolitics. Each reading forwards a particular proposition around this topic, and in the process of doing so also generates resources that can be drawn on by other scholars. In the second part of the course, we consider how we might use these resources in our own empirical works in the Northern Territory in Australia, which are parts of an ongoing collaboration between the Department of Sociology at the Goethe University in Frankfurt and the Northern Institute at the Charles Darwin University in Darwin. More specifically, we collectively explore the possibilities of generating a cosmopolitical sensitivity at a time when the capacities of mainstream western political practices to deal with differences within and beyond their own framing appear increasingly limited.-1
Papers by Michaela Spencer
Leading from the North: Rethinking Northern Australia Development
Social Studies of Science, 2020
In this paper, we explore possibilities for reconceptualising cosmopolitics by focusing on sites ... more In this paper, we explore possibilities for reconceptualising cosmopolitics by focusing on sites and situations where the problem of un/commonness plays a central role. Stemming from ethnographic research carried out as part of an ongoing collaboration called 'Landscapes of Democracy', we outline a study of democratic politics that extends beyond the politics of a single world and attend to landscapes of political practice which embed, and sometimes deny, 'shimmering' multiplicity. We follow the chronological unfolding of our fieldwork in Germany and Australia, and trace politics across worlds by telling alternating stories about how commonness and uncommonness is achieved in specific parliamentary settings in Frankfurt, Berlin, Darwin and Milingimbi -- a Yolngu community in the Northern Territory. In doing so, we interrogate the relationship between commonness and uncommonness, not as an opposition, but as a series of situated efforts to find out and articulate what needs to be made un/common, for what purposes, and on what terms. Bringing into focus such explicit and implicit framings of cosmopolitics suggests that there is potential for partial and situated practices on the ground to rework un/common futures through the continual reimagining of pasts and the configuration of people-places to which these futures are tied.
Science, Technology & Human Values, 2019
This paper focuses on a water management project in the remote Aboriginal community of Milingimbi... more This paper focuses on a water management project in the remote Aboriginal community of Milingimbi, Northern Australia. Drawing on materials and experiences from two distinct stages of this project, we revisit a policy report and engage in ethnographic storytelling in order to highlight a series of sensing practices associated with water management. In the former, a working symmetry between Yolngu and Western water knowledges is actively sought through the practices of the project. However, in the latter, recurrent asymmetries in the research work continue to appear: a bilingual diagram of water usage is displayed, but produces confusion; measuring a waterhole for salinity, a member of the scientific team throws in a water meter while a Yolngu Elder prefers the telling of an ancestral story; a collaborative 3D mapping exercise invites participation from community members but struggles to develop an outcome that differs from existing maps used by scientists and government staff. Focusing on these moments as subtle points of rupture, we suggest that attending to “seeing,” “telling,” and “mapping” in both stages of this water management project offers a way to explore the political work of crafting climate futures and beginning to interrogate differing means for “doing difference” within them.
Spencer, M. (2005) ‘Modest Interventions: An Ontological Investigation of Acid Sulfate Soils’ in TRAFFIC, Vol. 7: 77-93
Other publications by Michaela Spencer
EASST Review, 2019
What happens when STS scholars become active participants in the emergence of policy worlds? This... more What happens when STS scholars become active participants in the emergence of policy worlds? This question seems a natural corollary to the topic discussed in the last EASST Review editorial, where Andreas Kuznetsov (2019) suggested that there might be much that STS could offer when engaging with both science and social scientific research practices. It is also a question with which me and other STS colleagues working in a small regional university in northern Australia are frequently confronted with...
EASST Review , 2018
This piece reflects on the panel ‘Of Other Landscapes’ held at EASST Lancaster in 2018. Recognisi... more This piece reflects on the panel ‘Of Other Landscapes’ held at EASST Lancaster in 2018. Recognising the particularly warm, playful and yet serious atmosphere of academic exchange which emerged in this session, I raise the question of how do STS sensitivities travel? Are there ways that the particular spirit of this panel might be extended after it is over?
EASST Review, 2019
Pushed by the experience of two recent STS conferences and the realisation that a "hub" of STS re... more Pushed by the experience of two recent STS conferences and the realisation that a "hub" of STS research was developing in northern Australia, the authors discuss the emergence of "TopEndSTS", explaining how it evokes a sense of situated research which includes and engages disparate climatic environments, complex interplays of connection and ‘remoteness’, and the co-presence of many differing Western and Indigenous modes of people-place making.
Reports by Michaela Spencer
Book Reviews by Michaela Spencer
Science and Technology Studies, 2016
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Teaching Documents by Michaela Spencer
Papers by Michaela Spencer
Other publications by Michaela Spencer
Reports by Michaela Spencer
Book Reviews by Michaela Spencer